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[Ian G Batten]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Watkin Simon wrote:

> section 28 or 29, Parliament did not mean the national security of Germany
> or prevention and detection of crime in Germany.  How are you supposed to
> decide whether to exercise a non-disclosure exemption on the basis of "the
> German police want this"?

I don't know, and as I didn't have the data requested it was rather
moot.  However, the policeman involved saw no problem in making a formal
request, which didn't say anywhere that I had the right to refuse to
answer, on the basis of ``we want this'' from the Germans.

> > I don't believe you mean 12 months.  I believe that's the stake in
> > the ground, and once the principle is lost the practice will rise
> > rapidly.  I also believe you will attempt to get data retention on
> > content, on the same slippery slope basis.

> I could say no.  I could say there's no suggestion of either of those
> eventualities anyway.  I could say ATCS only permits retention of
> communications data within the meaning of RIPA and that excludes content.  I
> could say one major CSP alone handles 22 MILLION SMS messages daily.  I

22 million x 160 characters per message is 3.5GBytes a day.  They charge
10p per messages.  3.5 Gigabytes would fit handily onto a DVD, which
costs a few pounds at most, or onto half a dozen CDs at about 10p each.
So, with revenue of 2.2 million pounds per day, they would have extra
costs of what?

> could say multiply that by 5 CSPs, then by 365 days and by 7 years.  (That's
> a joke by the way!)  I could say don't be so ridiculous.

The argument of ``we won't ask for it, because it's a lot of data''
doesn't impress me, because I know it's a management amount of data and
you have people who know that too.  If GCHQ don't have at least a
petabyte of disk in their machine hall I'd be stunned.

ian